Australia rejected 80 percent of Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria, charity claims

A charity organization has claimed that the government of Australia has rejected the asylum applications of 80 percent of Christian refugees from Iraq and Syria.

Barnabas Fund, an aid organization that supports persecuted Christians, has said that the federal government has rejected 80 percent of more that 300 refugee applications it had submitted to the office of Immigration Minister Peter Dutton.

The organization claimed that the overwhelming majority of visas were granted to Sunni Muslims from UNHCR camps.

"In our experience 80 per cent of our applications for Muslim converts have been rejected," South Asia Facilitator of Barnabas, Jude Simion, told Daily Mail Australia. Simion also noted that Christians tend to avoid UNHCR camps for fear of being persecuted.

Canon Dr. David Claydon, chair of the Barnabas Fund's persecuted minorities advocacy group, said that Dutton has asked Barnabas to bring Christian refugees into Australia. However, as many as 80 percent of the people it proposed as refugees were rejected, he claimed.

"Everyone [rejected] tends to be an apostate [someone who has converted]," said Claydon, noting that all had converted a long time ago.

He added that he never had a problem with those who were born Christians. "It is always the converts," he remarked.

A spokesman for Dutton said that Australia had accepted more than 4,000 refugees from Iraq and Syria for several years in addition to the special intake of 12,000 refugees.

Barnabas Fund Managing Director Colin Johnston said that other minorities in war-torn countries are also in need of help, not just the Christians.

"Over a million Christians have been displaced from Iraq and Syria, for example. There are countless others who desperately need help," he said.

Johnston and Claydon called for an increased and specific allocation for Christians and urged the Australian government to issue more visas for other persecuted minorities.

Barnabas Fund's Operation Safe Haven has rescued over 1,300 Syrian and Iraqi refugees. The group has raised $1.2 million to pay for the travel expenses of 1,048 Christians from the two war-torn countries.

There were about 1.5 million Christians in Iraq in 1990, but there are only 300,000 left in the country today. In Syria, at least half of the 2 million Christians have left since the 2011 civil war, and many of those who remain are internally displaced.

Johnston believes that many displaced Christians would not return to their villages even if the Iraqi forces succeed in liberating the areas controlled by the Islamic State. He said that Christians are afraid of the hostility from their neighbors and of getting caught in the crossfire between more powerful Sunni and Shia militants and military.